Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:
- Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead. This 2000 novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is built around three essentially motherless preteen girls who are ultimately unsupportable as believable characters. I kept reading, wondering why, only to find the ending simply evaporate. She has her fans, but I’m not one of them.
- Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds: History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. As someone with long familiarity with both natural history and art museums, I have also long visited American history museums without giving them much thought as a separate category until my wife mentioned the cabinet of curiosities concept, based on the trunks seafaring captains were expected to bring home for the enlightenment of their communities. Wonderful insights in these essays into the growth and critical limitations of theme-focused collections, living history villages, historic house sites, shrines, and so on. My favorite rips Disney, especially at EPCOT, to shreds.
- Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction. Despite her glimpses into Deep South and Creole society in the late 1800s, Chopin’s portrayal of an infantile self-centered heroine, like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina before her, drew little sympathy from me. Tedious.
- Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic. A lively, humorous story with a pair of very dysfunctional, professorial parents unfolding in the background of the protagonist’s own string of affairs and failing marriage. In the end, quite pointed, bitterly funny, and emotional moving. Quite different from Empire Falls.
- Angelo M. Pellegrini: The Food-Lover’s Garden; The Unprejudiced Palate; Lean Years, Happy Years; and Vintage Pellegrini. More than a decade before Julia Child began to transform American cuisine, this Seattle-based English professor born in Italy launched his own arguments for a more delicious, healthier alternative to the dull meals of the era, on one hand, and the impossible directions for preparing pretentious international fare, on the other. For those who grew up thinking spaghetti came out of a can, as I did, Pellegrini’s texts are a reminder that even garlic, zucchini, and broccoli were exotic rarities, when they could be found at all. (As for cheese?) His emphasis remains stubbornly on fresh vegetables and fruit, the essential role of homegrown herbs, and the joys of wines made in one’s own cellar. I love the simplicity of many of his meals – a broth, salad, and bread as dinner, for instance. His stories along the way are delightful. I can see why he has long been one of my wife’s favorite food writers.
- Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Blue Shoes. Another of my wife’s favorites, Lamott’s confessions of faith are refreshingly both comic and startling. While the novel Blue Shoes sets out on that light-toned approach, about halfway through it takes on a dark realism that soon parallels Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, complete with the parents’ infidelities. It’s hard to think of other authors who present children as masterfully as she does, or, for that matter, relations with a parent in mental decline. Her real-life religion admits the realities of adultery, even among believers, and of grace in unexpected encounters. The protagonist’s discoveries about her own father lead to some of the most heart-breaking pages one will encounter, and some of the most illuminating examples of selfless love. A knockout.









